OK, to be more accurate, pretty much whole body pain.
I went wakeboarding for the first time ever today with none other than JoeB. Pretty cool when you get to go wakeboarding with the progenitor of The Game (which some of you might know I dabble in now and again, to say the least) and my great-great-grandboss, all rolled into one cool guy.
To be more accurate, though, really Joe went wakeboarding. Me, I more played Mr. Bobblehead, sitting in the water, standing up (or rising to a slightly higher sit) briefly, then face-planting, ass-planting, or otherwise planting right back into the water. Marc fared a little better, getting a pair of good straight runs, but really it was just a big bailfest for both of us. Way freakin' harder than it looks ... takes much more strength and energy, too.
Right off, I knew my legs were absolutely toast. I had trouble walking straight for the first few hours and that wore off a bit so I'm doing OK with the walking despite the soreness. I thought that my upper body was fine, since I didn't really feel any pain there, but I had to move a computer from one office to another one today and as soon as I picked it up, it's as if my forearms woke up and said, "Uh, no. What do you think you're doing?" Kind of an exploding pain. Same thing tonight when I helped Rome move some furniture (great timing, eh?).
I'm sure I'll be paying for this for a few days, being out of shape and all, but it was so much fun that it was totally worth it. It was an absolutely perfect morning - no wind, totally flat lake (Lake Washington, for those who are familiar with Seattle), nobody else around, sun shining, warm water ... absolutely beautiful and a great way to spend a morning outdoors, though it makes it tough to work up the motivation to head into work. The only thing I really regret is that I don't really have a way to do this consistently, so by the time I get another chance, I'm sure it'll have been long enough that I'll have forgotten everything from today and start over from scratch.
Oh well ... so it goes.
Random side note, for those of you interested in gaming. Soul Calibur 2 is out finally, which just about any console gamer worth their salt already knows about (and probably has). Anybody else notice something strange about the colors for the different versions, though?
The Playstation 2 version is blue - no big surprise, since that's been PS2's color all along. GameCube's is green, though, leaving red for the Xbox version. This should immediately strike any avid console gamer as backward - Nintendo has been using red forever (remember the bright red Nintendo logo) and Xbox is all about green - always has been. While I understand that they're pushing Link hard for the GameCube version, and green matches his color scheme, this still looks screwy to me every time I see it.
--Nick
Edit: Typo fixes.
As part of the massive patriotic upwelling after 9/11, there was a lot of New York pride that seems to linger on today - everyone there seems pretty convinced it's the best place in the world. Of course, my friends in Texas always disagree ... every single one of them seems to think that Texas is Eden reincarnated - the level of pride there is astonishing. Then, there's my friends into politics, who insist that Washington, D.C. is the capstone of the country. And that's not counting all the ones that think you've got to leave the country before you can even start having this discussion.
Every last damned one of them is wrong. Las Vegas. Best place on Earth, and anyone that argues otherwise is just deluding themselves.
One thing I'm always struck by when I'm there is how there's always a frightening amount of attractive women wandering around at all hours in Vegas. Well, not frightening ... let's say impressive. And as long as we're making revisions, let's say an impressive number of women who could have been attractive. I say could have been because what actually is frightening is how damned many of them smoke. Yuck! I see it so uncommonly in day to day life nowadays that it's a bit of shell shock to see just how many people in Vegas smoke. It's a good thing that the other thing that Vegas is best in the world at is ventilation systems, because otherwise those casinos would be asthma attacks waiting to happen.
I was actually in Vegas with a bunch of friends for a bachelor party (to answer in advance, no, nothing untoward happened) and our whole crew stayed at the Venetian. We're at the V Bar on Friday night hanging out at a booth and there's these two women sitting at the end of the bar by the door ... nobody really paid any attention to them and the story really ought to have ended there. As we're leaving, though, we're standing outside the bar and there's one guy missing. Turns out, he happened to be the polite one and said hello to the two girls and several minutes later, he walks out with them on his arm. It takes all of about five minutes for us to figure out that he is not at all interested in these girls, having just inherited them from being nice. It takes them, on the other hand, about four hours to figure it out, three casinos and two cab rides later. And really, after typing all of that, there ought to be a punch line, but there really isn't. Guess you had to be there.
I spent the afternoon on Saturday playing poker, but most of the crew went to hang out at the pool. As related to me after the fact, they spent some time trying to fish the feminine product out of the pool with a towel before giving up, since it kept sinking when they went after it. Every glamorous spot has a seedy side, apparently ...
We decided at one point before dinner Saturday that we should just walk the Strip and look around, 100 degree weather notwithstanding. The destination was decided to be the Bellagio, about two Vegas (read: huge-ass) blocks away from the Venetian. So we start walking and we make it about 600 yards, tops, when we run into the Casino Royale, advertising 100x odds on $3 Craps. Suffice it to say, we never ended up making it to the Bellagio.
At the Casino Royale, everyone in our group bet big anytime one of us was shooting - gotta have faith in the boys and all. Little tip for you. The safest bet in Vegas - Don't Pass when I'm shooting. I don't believe I've ever, in history, ever made a point. Ever. You can take that one all the way to the bank, but keep it to yourself.
The slots were strange this weekend. People were totally not losing their shirts like they were supposed to. One guy in our group, Alex, decided on a whim to just drop twenty into a slot machine and see what came out. He hit on three spins in a row and picked up $350. What is that? We also saw a woman win a thousand bucks on a spin at Wheel of Fortune. I tell you, I'll never play slots because I know you're just bound to lose and the odds are massively crappy, but it's hard to beat a 1000x return ...
No trip to Vegas, to me, is complete without a trip to the Bellagio Buffet. At least, that's what Tak and I think. Dom used to think so, too, but he bailed on us despite the offer of a free dinner, so I think he's lost the faith. Anyway, Sunday night rolled around and the two of us decided that we'd break away from the group to go hit the buffet. We had a concert to get to after dinner, so we needed to meet at 8:55 back at the Venetian. So we left the Venetian to walk over to the Bellagio at 6:15 - ordinarily you'd think that's more than enough time, but we forgot this is the always packed Bellagio Buffet, on Labor Day weekend. We got in line to get in at 6:45. We actually got in at 8:25. 8:25! Now, it's a terribly pathetic day when Tak and I go to a buffet and only take one trip each, but I do think we deserve some props for the fastest buffet trip ever. It took about 10 minutes for us to grab as much food as we could fine. We scarfed it down in 10 minutes flat, tossed the tip on the table, and bolted for the cab line. Entered the Venetian lobby at 8:55. Not bad work, if I do say so myself ... though I don't recall stopping to chew ... or taste ... pretty much just opened the throat and shoved it all down there.
The 8:55 deadline was to get over to the Las Vegas Hilton for the Huey Lewis and the News concert - the bachelor is a huge, huge fan of theirs. The striking thing about both the concert and the hotel was the age difference from the newer, "hipper" places on the Strip. The Hilton seemed to attract an older crowd, not only by coincidence, but by their actions - the staff and the waitresses (none of which seemed to be under 60!) were all older and it seemed like a more relaxed, comfortable place with less of the pressure of the glitz and glamour ... a rather interesting change of pace from the rest of Vegas. The concert itself also had an older crowd, Huey Lewis being big in the 80s and all, and I think we were among the younger people there.
The concert itself was pretty damned cool ... I knew of the band and the fact that they did a bunch of the songs in Back to the Future (songs with some seriously great music, for you three people out there who haven't already seen/heard them), but I didn't realize just how many songs they had that were huge hits that I really liked (I've always had a soft spot for 80s music). One song after another of songs that I like and didn't know was them. I also have to say that Huey Lewis, for a man in his 50s now, has still got some amazing chops ... Chris Klein seemed to agree. I didn't spot him myself, but several others in our group saw him sitting dead center near the front. Anyway, sure, Huey is showing his age some in his performance, but the singing and songs are still faultless, and he's got a great stage presence. The crowd was pretty weak, though - they'd get into things for a few minutes, but it's almost as if they calculated exactly how long they had to pretend to be excited about something before they could sit back down again ... at the end, some of the more fanatical bunch sustained some energy in the front, but other than that, it was a largely sad bunch. Oh well.
After the show, of course, what else is there to do but to do some gambling? Well, at least, to watch the others gamble. There's this odd phenomenon that I've noticed in myself about money in Vegas. They say that the wise thing to do is to bring the cash you intend to spend and not to bring any way to get any more, to prevent yourself from overspending. I did bring as much cash as I wanted to spend (well, no, actually, the amount I was willing to spend), but I still bring my cards in case of emergencies. Well, by this point, I was running low on cash and didn't think I'd have enough to gamble and take care of the rest of my expenses, and I didn't want to pay the ATM fee to get more cash. How absurd is that? I make a decent living, it's not like I had spent myself broke, but what stopped me from gambling more, my self-imposed willpower, is the stupid $2.50 fee. How idiotic is that? Compared to all the money spent in Vegas, compared to the amount you have to have in order to have a reasonable gambling session, $2.50 is literally nothing. And yet, that's the bit that feels like it's being wasted, and I'm just not willing to pay the $2.50 for something I can get for free at my bank. Some old habits die hard, I guess.
We had a contingent playing craps, trying to rekindle the preshow luck (Parker was at the craps table before the show and the table had the most ridiculous run of luck I've ever seen - he more than doubled his money in the span of 20 minutes with no trouble) and a contingent at the blackjack table and I bounced between the two for a while before settling on the blackjack table, since that's where all the fun was happening. During this time, there was a woman at the far end of the table who was very lively, chatting things up with other players, the dealer, and the pit boss. She pulled five 8s in a row, which is amazing. I've seen four before - Jim's had that happen - but not five. Of course, the fifth one sucks, but that's beside the point. She also, at one point, was paid off for a blackjack that she didn't get and decided that she'd rather not go to hell and returned the money - something I respect her a lot for. She figured it would bring her good karma, which of course, it didn't. Not right away - the next hand was blackjack for the dealer - and not really over the long run, either. See, right after this happened, this new guy sat down, two seats before her in the deal. And this guy seriously had no idea how to play blackjack. Standing on low soft numbers against 5s and 6s, splitting 4s, standing on 15s against a showing 10, and even splitting 10s (!!!). Seriously, the kind of player that casinos love to bring in. Anyway, since every action that somebody does changes the cards down the table, this woman was getting pissed off because he'd do something wrong and then she'd bust, or the dealer would end up beating her out of a bad hand. Ordinarily this is the kind of thing where people only pay attention to the bad events and ignore the good ones, where everything should even out, but in this case I decided to count and she really did get totally screwed by this guy an order of magnitude more often than she was helped out by this guy. She kept turning to the pit boss saying, "He just split 10s. Do you believe that?" and the pit boss would sympathize, answering that no, that probably wasn't a great idea, but while he had no reason to care whether the table was winning or losing himself, he had this look on his face the whole time that approached nothing short of supreme amusement. The only thing better for the casino than a bad player is one that takes the whole table down with them. (OK, now, for all you nitpickers out there, no I didn't track the changes in the cards between hands - I can't count cards that well - so the comparison isn't that accurate. Still, she had a good case from the easily observable data.)
We eventually ended up at the Nightclub, a small club at the Hilton. Not one of the more famous/glamorous/happening/
The club closed at 3:00, and I had to head to the airport shortly after that. See, being an idiot, I forgot it was Labor Day when I booked my tickets a few weeks ago, so I figured that if I took an early flight, I could get in early enough to go straight to work and not to have to take an extra day's vacation. Really stupid. Anyway, the airport wasn't horrible that early in the morning (though there were still a good number of people) and I sat down at the gate, only to hear the following announcement. "Whoever left your false teeth and hearing aid in the men's restroom, if you can hear me, please come reclaim them at the desk." How great is that? Only in Vegas, where the airport has more slot machines than chairs. Even their airport workers are cooler than anywhere else.
Sitting on the plane, I was all ready to go to bed, but as is my custom, I read the in-flight magazine waiting for the plane to start taking off before I went to bed. The other woman in my row, though, managed somehow to look more beat than me and was fast asleep until the flight attendants behind us started cracking the ice in preparation for the flight, which brought her back to reality. I felt kind of bad for her, given how exhausted she looked, so I did what I never do - I actually talked to someone random on the plane, sympathizing with her about the noise. Turns out, her name is Gina, and she's the current tour publicist for the Goo Goo Dolls. How cool is that? Turns out she was in town for the VH1 Concerts taping of their show from Saturday (to be aired on September 9th) and coordinating some opening bands, MTV appearances, and the like. She's tossing all of this out as if it's just same-old same-old and I'm just sitting there thinking that she's got the coolest job ever. She's exhausted because she's been post-partying all weekend with the band and dealing with the contest winners that got to meet them. Guess it goes to show you that everyone's job can get a little routine after a little while. Anyway, very cool person to meet, though really, that's the kind of person you want to meet on the flight in, before the concert (though I'm sure that she's tired of people asking to get into shows ... probably for the best)!
So, how'd I make out in the end? I ended up down $120 - up $62 on poker, down $180 on table games. About how I knew it'd go ... I typically win at poker and I know I typically lose at table games, to the extent that I never play them anymore. I made an exception here so I could play with the guys and ended up paying for it. Not too bad, though ... still fun and it's all about hanging out with your friends, in the end. I should have made just about all of it back, though, except for one assinine idiotic hand of poker that ended up ending all of my gambling for the rest of the weekend out of frustration (that and the whole running out of spare cash thing). <gambling jargon>I'm playing 3-6 hold-em and get dealt an Ace of Hearts and a Two. I pay the $3 to stay in and see the flop, two face-card hearts and another random card. At this point, people check around to one woman, who bets with no hesitation. I stay in, figuring that she's got nothing better than high pair at this point and I still have a flush possibility if two hearts come up as well as the Ace as an out. Everyone else folds. The turn comes up - it's a heart as well, a 9 or a 10. She bets hard again, and though with the four cards I figure that she might have a straight or even a flush, but since she bet hard earlier, still sticking her at a pair and deciding that I can still take her with an Ace or a heart. The river shows up and it's not a heart, so I promptly fold, forgetting until after the next hand is being dealt that my 2 was also a heart and I had the nut flush after the turn! I folded the nut flush ... who does that? It's like she was saying, "Here, take my money," and I responded, "No, no, I insist, take mine ... I don't want it anyway." You get screwed on the river by someone who shouldn't have stayed in, you're angry, but you get over it - eventually that kind of thing catches up with the bad players. But here, there's noone to blame but myself and my raw stupidity. I took it as a sign that I was no longer paying attention and left, but seriously, I don't deserve to play poker anymore after that debacle and I'm still fuming about it.</gambling jargon> Damn, I hate Vegas.
No wait. That's not right. Viva Las Vegas! I love that place. Man, I miss it already.
--Nick